In summary, there were big bad black men outside a polling station in 2008. That must have been something to do with the Obama campaign because he is black. The lack of prosecution must be because the men were black, not because there was no evidence.

As far as Republicans are concerned there’s Holder, there’s Obama and there is the New Black Panthers. Something links them all together. We are supposed to be convinced that it is both the one obvious factor, while at the same time despite their screams, we are not supposed to believe it has anything to do with that at all. Oh, no, no.

It is such an obvious pile of crap and nothing but a dirty bigoted attempt to foster racial tension shortly before the election. A continuation of the Summer of Hate.

The problem is the facts get in the way of this story.

One – the Fox News video. It does not actually provide the evidence that the likes of Fox and Republicans want.

On the video the police tell the two members of the New Black Panthers that they can not stop the people from voting. The Polling Clerk (around 30 seconds in) makes clear that they are not stopping people from voting.

Despite this the police instruct them to leave. They leave. There would have been no story about this except for the fact that New Black Panthers are big scary black men and there was a big scary black man running for President.

The polling station is in a district that went 95% for Kerry in 2004. So what the New Black Panthers were there to harass Democratic voters in to voting for a Democratic candidate?

The Bush administration opened this case in January 2009. They found no evidence but they case was kept open and was finally dropped in May 2009 as there was no evidence that any voter had actually been intimidated.

Abigail Thernstrom of the National Review (hardly a left wing rag) wrote “In the 45 years since the act was passed, there have been a total of three successful prosecutions. The incident involved only two Panthers at a single majority-black precinct in Philadelphia. So far — after months of hearings, testimony and investigation — no one has produced actual evidence that any voters were too scared to cast their ballots. Too much overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges has been devoted to this case.”

For all of the race baiting, for all of the investigations, no-one, not even Fox or Breitbart have been able to find one single intimidated voter. Not one.

For all the exciting “evidence” about the big scary black men that is being presented to Congress the reality is there is no victim. No voter was intimidated so there was no voter intimidation. Even despite this the Obama administration obtained an injunction against Shabbazz from patrolling polling stations. This continues past the 2012 election. There is no prospect of “this”, whatever this was, happening again.

This is nothing but pure racism. Republicans got so excited by the hatred they stirred against Muslims that they are not even bothering to disguise this. They really do not care. This is the the Summer of Hate repeated. It is red meat to get a bunch of bigots excited and whip them up into a continuation of hating people because of the their pigmentation. The attempt to pin this on the President and Eric Holder is simply because they are committing what is to Republicans the biggest crime of all, governing while black.